Graham Hancock
speaker
786 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Graham Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
guests on the show who have brought real important information to it. Amongst those geoglyphs in Brazil, we had a member of the Apurina people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs. And he talked to us about what is special to him about the geoglyphs, about how this is a sacred place to his tribe and how they still gather there today and how they
understand that is somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death. And that then rings a bell in my mind of that whole idea of a journey to the afterlife and a portal through which we pass into that other realm. We find that right there in Brazil.
Well, 3,000 years ago, you're still within the period of the Polynesian expansion. This is not the Ice Age. This is more recent. It's early in the Polynesian expansion rather than late. Easter Island was seen as one of the last places that the Polynesians got to. This new evidence is suggesting it may have been one of the first places that the Polynesians got to.
But the question that arises is, did they find the Moai already in place when they came there even 3,000 years ago? And I think there's a lot of evidence for that. I think that this is going to make archaeologists absolutely furious with me. But I hope that I'm paying full respect to indigenous traditions. We had an amazing Easter Island elder who told us the tradition of the lost land of Hever.
Easter Island has its own flood myth. They say that there was a huge land in the Pacific far, far away called Hever, HIVA, and that it was destroyed in a flood cataclysm. and that there were survivors, specifically seven wise men. That's another thing that is found all around the world. It's found in ancient Sumer. It's found in ancient Egypt. It's found almost everywhere.
Specific seven wise men who came and settled Easter Island after this great cataclysm. So it's great to have indigenous testimony on that. And then you have the mystery of the Easter Island script. How did that happen? How come this tiny island... which only ever had a population of a few thousand, did something that is normally only done by big civilizations, which was create a written script.
But they have a script, the Easter Island script, and it's written on wooden boards. And we learned that these were the boards we see today, none of which, by the way, are in Easter Island now. They're all in museums around the world. They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out.
And these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned. And to have a fully formed elaborate script, which nobody can interpret today, you have to remember the tragic history of Easter Island. There was a point where Easter Island's population was reduced to just 11 people. And it was reduced to 11 people by Peruvian slave raids.
They came and slaved the people of Easter Island, and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in the Pacific. Eventually, there was a movement to restore them to their homeland, and gradually people came back. But at one point, its population was reduced to 11. All the elders were wiped out, those who were the memory carriers.
And so what's left now is just a hint of a memory of these things. But they speak with awe of these tablets with the script on it. And to me, that is a sign, again, that there's something wrong with our understanding of Easter Island. How can we explain that this tiny little place produces its own written language?
Why would it even need a written language when you can walk across the island in three hours? It wouldn't need to communicate in that way, and yet it had its own script.
If you look up the word rongo rongo, R-O-N-G-O, rongo rongo tablets.
There they are.
It bears some curious similarities to the Indus Valley script, which has also not been deciphered. And let's hope AI can decipher both of them.
And the way it runs is you read from left to right along the top row. Then you go from right to left along the next row. Then you go from left to right along the nexo and so on and so forth, a sort of snake-like. How do they know that? Because that's one of the memories that's been preserved by the Easter Islanders and because of the way they all run on. And what do they think it represents?
Nobody knows it. All we have is an oral tradition, which itself is very fragmented and very faint because of that reduction of Easter Island's population to just 11 people. And the fact that the elders who were, within historical times, able to read these tablets were all wiped out.
Cuneiform, I think, because of its relationship to later languages, which were known. I mean, cuneiform is a writing system. You find the earliest version, I think, amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well. But when you have a language and you have a language that it's related to that you can read...
Or where you have a text in two different languages, but it's the same text. Then you're in a place where you can begin to translate it. That's what the Rosetta Stone does in ancient Egypt because we have it in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but we also have it in Greek. And that's why suddenly the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was cracked because of the Rosetta Stone.
Well, there isn't a Rosetta Stone for the Easter Island script or for the Indus Valley script. But I think in the case of the cuneiform, there was something similar, some context to place it in.
No.
Showing 321–340 of 786 · page 17 of 40
← Previous
Next →